


Harbor

by lepidopteran



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Future Fic, M/M, POV Outsider, Post-Dark Continent Arc, just a little something to light our way through the long dark hiatus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 11:08:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17466428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lepidopteran/pseuds/lepidopteran
Summary: Leorio builds a house.





	Harbor

It’s a clear, bright morning when the man comes. The sky is a flat and perfect blue; the light shines undisturbed on every rolling hill and cliffside crevice of Whale Island. It’s a day when secrets can’t be kept. Fishers would say it’s a perfect day for fishing, birds say it’s a perfect day for singing, and to Mito it’s a perfect day for laundry.

The shirts and sheets start to crisp the moment she hangs them on the line. The simple domestic task is saturated with the pleasure of knowing that the ones she loves are safe. She hums to herself as she imagines laying out fresh sheets on her own bed, on Abe’s, on Gon’s; sweeping the dust out of Gon’s bedroom and opening his window to let in the clean air. _Just in case he comes home_ , but the thought holds none of the old anxiety. Gon is safe and accounted for, nearly grown and more responsible—maybe even a little wiser.

She looks out past the billows of white linen to the horizon, the line almost indistinct where calm blue sea meets clear blue sky. The visibility is so high that she sees the ship as a distant speck long before it comes to harbor. The sea is so still, the day so windless, that the frigate creeps along at an agonizing pace. As it comes nearer she can see that all sails are up, the crew no doubt struggling to catch the slightest breeze. She sits herself down on the hill and watches for a while, remembering a clear day much like this when Gon came home. She lets herself imagine for a moment that perhaps it _is_ her son. But he would’ve written ahead. He’s very good about writing, these days.

So by the time it reaches the harbor, she’s back indoors. But if she prepares a bit extra for lunch— _just in case_ —who’s to blame her? When Abe comes into the kitchen, steps a little creaky but eyes still keen, she squints at the spread and asks, “Are we having company?”

“I just had a feeling,” Mito says.

There’s a window just above the sink, so she can gaze and daydream as she does the washing up. Mito believes there should always be a window above any sink for just this purpose. So she sees the man as soon as he crests the hill.

She nearly drops the cup she’s drying, because his hair is a mess of spikes and his skin is dark, and Gon could perhaps be taller by now, couldn’t he? But as he comes closer she sees that he’s thin, far too thin.

 _Far_ too thin. When he staggers she’s already halfway down the path and there to catch him. His coat is roughly made of waxed sailcloth and impossibly weathered under her hands, cracked and stained, stinking of salt and fish, as if he’s been at sea for years. When he raises his head she sees that the lower right quadrant of his face, from ear to nose and cheek to jaw—isn’t there, almost as if eaten away by acid, but stranger, smoother, as if it were simply wiped away like wet paint. 

The rest of his face she recognizes, from somewhere, and she racks her brain until she lands on it. He was on television, that’s right, punching Ging clean in the face -- down at the pub they had it on tape and screened it for weeks (but Mito, of course, was above watching it more than two or three times). But this man’s face is more familiar still. She recalls seeing him in pictures, attached to the emails Gon delightedly showed her, before the emails abruptly stopped.

“ _Leorio?_ ”

“At your service,” he says, and passes out.

 

*

 

Leorio sleeps for two straight days in Gon’s bed. When he comes downstairs for the first time, he says over the cup of stew Mito serves him, “I don’t want to impose.”

Mito ladles another serving into his cup, making sure there’s plenty of meat. “Nonsense.”

They sit and eat in silence. After three or four cups, some warmth returns to Leorio’s cheeks. He takes their dishes to the sink and starts washing up without being asked.

“Gon won’t be home for a while, you know.” She tries to raise the topic delicately, but she can’t see any reason Leorio would come to the island if not for Gon.

But Leorio doesn’t seem surprised. “Where is he now?”

“Traveling with Kite,” Mito says. “He got permission from the school board to finish off his education with an apprenticeship.”

Leorio smiles, and it reaches his eyes. He doesn’t look nearly as broken as he should, for all he’s clearly been through. “He must be happy.”

“It seems he is,” Mito says.

Leorio proves himself to be handy around the house, and willing to work. Mito has him clean out all the high cupboards she can’t reach without a stepladder. She borrows clothes for him from one of their taller neighbors—under the dirty ship-rat coat, he arrived in a nurse’s kit stained with what was surely blood.  
  
They don’t talk about where Leorio came from. His smiles are lopsided, the skin puckered and pulled taut at the edges of the blank space where the rest of his mouth should be, but they are also genuine. He laughs. He whistles. He cracks bad jokes.

But he also looks at the sea. He lingers after doing the dishes to stare out the window. Mito often finds him up before dawn, sitting on the roof with a cup of coffee and watching the tides and the ships come in and out. She hears from the lighthouse-keeper that Leorio often visits, and climbs the winding stairs to look out over the fog.

Mito recognizes in his eyes something too familiar. His heart, she knows, is somewhere else.

It’s Abe, never said to be tactful, who finally asks. “Leorio, do you have a family?”

“Yes, I do.” He turns from the window and crouches by Abe’s chair, slings an arm around her shoulders. “I promised to meet them here.”  
  
The next day Leorio says, “I want to build a house.”

 

*  
  
  
They mark out a plot further down the hill, tucked away from the wind. It’s near enough that Mito will be able to see the smoke from the chimney and the light from the windows. Two bedrooms, Leorio says. Then he scratches his chin and says, “Three, just in case.”

“Be sure there’s a window over the sink,” Mito advises.

Abe oversees the construction, having built the house where Mito and Gon both grew up. The growing summer heat is perfect to set the cob, and the structure of the little house rises up day by day. Leorio moves in as soon as there are four walls, sleeping under a hurried tin roof.

By the time Mito digs up the year’s yams from her garden plot, the house is finished. She insists that Leorio still come around for dinner, but as soon as the washing up is done he rushes home before nightfall and lights lanterns in each of the windows. Mito watches the little squares of light pop out of the dusk, one by one, night after night.  
  
Leorio gets a job gutting fish. Someone sees how steady his hand is and he gets a job helping the island’s barber, who is also the island’s doctor. Word gets around and soon enough he’s no longer a barber, just a doctor. Complaints of aches and pains among the fisherfolk reach an all-time low.

It’s a wet fall, followed by a wet winter. There’s a mudslide on the other side of the hill, but the little house holds up well. “It’s got a good foundation,” Abe says. If it were anyone else, Mito might think the words had a double meaning. But Abe is not so sentimental.

Mito is, so privately she thinks to herself: love. Leorio’s house is surely built on love, on waiting for love to come home.

 

*

 

It’s a cruel, stormy night when the man comes. Through the whipping wind and rain, Mito sees Leorio sitting up on his newly shingled roof. The waxy coat he arrived in, nearly a year ago now, is tented over his head. Lanterns glow in all his windows and he holds another lantern between his knees, flame flickering wildly.

He must feel something in the air. Mito feels it too.

She throws on a coat and hat and wraps up a thermos of piping hot ginger tea. A foghorn bellows. She’s halfway down to the little house when she sees a figure rise through the mist, staggering but with its head held high, and shouting past the wind, loud and long as the foghorn but not half so mournful—

“Leorioooooo!”

Mito nearly drops the thermos, fumbles to catch it and wraps her arms tight around it as she runs, not minding how her feet slide in the wet grass. She flings out her arm and calls, “There! That’s his house, there!”

Lightning flashes and for a moment Mito sees the man lit up stark and clear. His head and shoulders are draped with layers of ragged cloth and there’s a bundle in his arms. Mito skids to a stop. But he’s not Ging, no, he’s nothing like Ging when his tired eyes go soft—

Mito looks over her shoulder and there’s Leorio, long legs flailing, grasping handfuls of grass to drag himself up the rain-drenched slope. Voice raw with shouting “Kurapika!”

Kurapika shouts, “Leorio!”

He drops the bundle. The bundle grows awkward arms and legs and a head of curly hair and also shouts, “Leorio!”

Leorio scrambles up, swings the bundle into his arms and shouts, “Woble!”

Mito slips back into the dark. By the time she’s home and watching through her window—can you blame a girl for being curious?—they’re still shouting each others names, calling back and forth, stumbling home.

 

*

 

Mito gives them a few days to themselves before she comes around with a pie. Leorio stammers his way through the introductions:  
  
“This is Kurapika, my uh—”

“Partner,” Kurapika interjects. He’s huddled by the kitchen counter in one of Leorio’s sweaters, an enormous mug of coffee between his small hands. The window over the sink casts clear morning light on his gold hair and the shadows under his dark eyes. His smile is wan, but it’s there. “Partner is fine.”

“My partner,” Leorio says, his smile growing goofier by the second. “And this is Woble, his—”

“Our,” Kurapika corrects.

“Our, um—”

“Daughter,” Kurapika provides.

“Our daughter.” Leorio beams.

Woble looks about four or five, with coltish limbs and a round face. She sits on the tiled floor at Kurapika’s feet, demeanor serious as she bangs a carved wooden fish against a carved wooden dog. Leorio sits down beside her, folding his long legs under him.

“Would you like to say hello, Woble?”

She tucks her face close by Leorio’s and her round eyes dart to Mito, shy but curious. “Who’s that?”

Leorio says without hesitating, “That’s my best friend.”

Wordlessly and with great solemnity, Woble hands Mito the wooden dog.

**Author's Note:**

> woble ........


End file.
